People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Chief of General Staff Chen Bingde (陳炳德), who visited Washington last week, caused a bit of a stir when he claimed that China only had a garrison deployment across from Taiwan and did not have operational deployments, much less missiles, stationed there.
While those comments were immediately ridiculed by Taiwanese authorities and the US Department of Defense, the fact of the matter is that Chen wasn’t lying outright — the veracity of his claim depends on how one defines “across from Taiwan.”
One thing that history should have taught us about negotiating with China is that it’s all about the context. If what Chen meant by “across from Taiwan” was China’s Fujian Province, then technically he was telling the truth, as the Second Artillery — the unit responsible for the bulk of China’s missile arsenal — has maintained a garrison in Fujian for more than a decade and it is not altogether impossible that missiles are not permanently deployed there.
As is often the case, however, the pith of the matter lies in what Chinese officials did not say. In the present case, what Chen omitted is that elsewhere in China, the missile threat against Taiwan continues to expand and is doing so despite ostensibly warmer relations between Taipei and Beijing. As the range, precision and potential destructiveness of the PLA missile arsenal grows, “across from Taiwan” loses all meaning, at least up to the point where the missiles are no longer within range.
This may sound trivial, but this would not be so if Beijing were to offer to dismantle its missiles targeting Taiwan — as the US and Taipei have long demanded — whereupon specificity, rather than vagueness, will be key. If, at some point, Beijing were to take “seriously” requests that it dismantle or pull back its missiles, lack of specificity could allow it to get away with murder (“If the missiles don’t exist, how can we dismantle them?” China could rightly ask).
The Second Artillery’s Base 52, which is headquartered “across from Taiwan” in Huangshan, Anhui Province, has at least six short-range missile brigades in Fujian, Jiangxi, Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces, all intended for a Taiwan contingency. Several of the delivery systems are road mobile, while other missiles and their components can be distributed to any of the six brigades throughout Southeast China and launched from there.
The 70-year-old Chen wasn’t showing signs of senility when he made those comments in Washington, nor did he think that US officials, who have substantial imagery intelligence proving the contrary, were fools. Rather, he was setting the scene for what could eventually become the parameters for negotiations on Taiwan. While we can already expect Beijing to observe commitments in the breach, it is also known that it will exploit to the fullest whatever room to maneuver it is given as a result of the other side’s failure to request specifics. This is China’s negotiating style, as any British official who handled talks in the 1980s ahead of Hong Kong’s retrocession in 1997 would tell us.
Chinese officials aren’t being vague out of carelessness or some ideological proclivity for imprecision; they know exactly what they are doing and they thrive on our failure to see their game, or when we approach negotiations with a sense of cultural superiority.
Chen knows the map of China and is well informed on the number of ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as artillery, the PLA has targeted at Taiwan. What he and his masters count on is our ignorance and our impatience as we rush headlong whenever we see a possibility of signing just about any agreement with China.
China has quietly unloaded 10 percent, or US$100 billion, of its US Treasury holdings in the first half of the year. During the past 40 years of rapid economic growth after recovering from a quasi-ruined state that officially ended in 1976, China has amassed a huge pile of foreign reserves partially through its trade surplus. The US Treasuries have always been the prime choice for China to park its foreign reserves. What made it run away from the traditional safe haven for its hard-earned foreign reserves? One explanation is that Beijing is leveraging its financial power as the second-largest US Treasury
Sometimes When there is a choice to be made, none of the options are good. The choice between hooking up with communism — in its Chinese iteration, the one that bugs Taiwan the most — and neofascism, of the back-to-the-roots Italian variety or any other kind, is such a choice. The good news is that Taiwan does not have to choose. It neither needs to cozy up to China — the successes of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration, despite its shortcomings, are evidence of that — nor does it need to embrace Italy under its likely new leader, Italian lawmaker Giorgia
For many years, the military’s defense of the Taiwan Strait has been centered around the doctrine of establishing “air and maritime supremacy and repulsing landing forces.” However, after the legislature passed the Sea-Air Combat Power Improvement Plan Purchase Special Regulation (海空戰力提升計畫採購特別條例) last year, the doctrine was altered to “air defense, counterattack, and establish air and maritime supremacy,” with repelling landing forces removed from the equation. Despite the changes to the defense doctrine, landing operations and anti-landing operations still feature at the core of the military’s plans for the defense of the nation. The primary reason that peace in the Taiwan Strait has prevailed
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has created a dilemma that could soon cause him to be hoisted with his own petard, bringing his leadership of China to an end. His threatening rhetoric over the unification of Taiwan with China, in which he has said, “we are willing to draw blood if necessary,” has placed Xi in a corner. Xi is portrayed as a strong world leader, yet he has created a scenario for himself that most likely would have an unfavorable outcome. With the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) scheduled to convene this month, Xi cannot
RSS